6 ms·
I've always been mildly irritated that the name of the SI mass base unit has a prefix. Second, liter, meter, Newton, kilogram. Were I emperor of the world I wou
by Causality1 7y ago
I've always been mildly irritated that the name of the SI mass base unit has a prefix. Second, liter, meter, Newton, kilogram. Were I emperor of the world I would slide the name scale up so the mass equal to 2.205lbs was called a gram.
- function_seven 7y agoHow about we keep the current name and use it as a basis for prefixing? gram -> millikilogram milligram -> microkilogram metric ton -> kilokilogram ...never mind.
- bdowling 7y agoIt's almost a crime that a metric ton isn't called a "megagram". Aside, are the mega and giga prefixes ever used for anything except bits and bytes? (Edit: OK, OK. I forgot about megaohms, megahertz, megawatts. Also megapixels and Megadeth.)
- m_eiman 7y agoMegatons of TNT equivalent for big bombs.
- idrae 7y agoHere in the Netherlands GJ (gigajoule) is used for buildings that use blockheating.
- billpg 7y agoIt always feels a little grating when I hear someone say some number of "thousand kilometers".
- bdamm 7y agoYes, describing my old car's odometer as "250 megameters" is oddly satisfying to let roll of the tongue.
- ineedasername 7y agoI prefer to mix my references between metric & imperial: 1.55 deca-miles
- NPC32419419 7y agoGigajoules in Europe.
- seszett 7y agoMega-, giga- and terawatts are well used and relatively common. More specialised but still common enough are megaohms and mega/giga/terahertz.
- jabl 7y ago> Aside, are the mega and giga prefixes ever used for anything except bits and bytes? Sure, few examples of the top of my head: - Megatons, as in yield of nuclear weapons. Which is a bit odd unit, should be in J, goddammit! - Similarly, energy consumption/production. Commonly used units MWh, GWh, TWh. Again, the proper unit would be J, not Wh. Or Mtoe, for Million tons of oil equivalent.
- garmaine 7y ago> Megatons, as in yield of nuclear weapons. Which is a bit odd unit, should be in J, goddammit! That’s what is odd about it? It should be teragrams.
- jabl 7y agoIt's a measure of energy, hence the unit should be J (with some appropriate prefix).
- jsjohnst 7y agoPeta- would be the appropriate prefix. 4.184 PJ is 1 megaton.
- a1369209993 7y agoActually, it should be grams. 51.3162(...) grams, to be somewhat precise.
- apt-get 7y agoYield of explosives is generally measured in kilograms of TNT, that's why.
- garmaine 7y agoWhoosh.
- copeki 7y agoMegahertz, Megawatt, Megapixel?
- kragen 7y agoYes! Aside from the extremely common megahertz and gigahertz, commonly used units are megajoules, gigajoules, megawatts, gigawatts, terawatts, petajoules (when countries are negotiating about energy security), exajoules (when people measure world energy consumption), megohms, gigohms, megalitres (for the capacity of a dam, though teraliters would have been more appropriate), megapascals (of some kind of tensile strength typically), gigapascals (of Young's modulus typically), megaergs (back when people still used ergs), and so on.
- maxnoe 7y agoUm yes, for ..., like EVERYTHING? How much money do we have left in the budget -> Several k€. Astronomical distances in kilo, mega and giga parsecs / light years. Forces (e.g engine thrust) Kilo and Meganewtons. output of powerplants are usually in the Megawatt to Gigawatt. Frequencys of radio waves are Megahertz to Terahertz. Energy of cosmic Ray's goes all the way up to zetta electronvolts. I could name more
- teel 7y ago> and Megadeth.) Laughed at that one.
- philwelch 7y agoMegadeth is named after the term “megadeath”, a unit in Cold War calculations of possible nuclear attacks to designate a million deaths. The 80’s were a grim time. (You can actually see in the film Dr. Strangelove a scene where George C. Scott’s character leans over a binder labeled “World Targets in Megadeaths”.)
- ern 7y agoAn engineering mechanics textbook that I used had megagram as a unit.
- philwelch 7y agoGigawatts were popularized in a certain movie :)
- petschge 7y agoPhysicists studying the sun and effect on its surface use megameter as a length scale quite a bit.
- shpx 7y agoIf you were emperor of the world, I would implore you to finance a multibillion dollar project to measure the gravitational constant to higher percision so that we could move to units that actually make sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
- kragen 7y agoShpx, gung'f n shpxvat terng vqrn.
- cies 7y agoCame here to mention the Planck units, aka God's units :) Sadly they are a little outside of the human realm of experience, both in their single units (waaay to small usually) and in the units that the list contains (speed, electrical charge, etc; where we like "introductory" units such as length, time, weight)
- skykooler 7y agoWith the exception of the Planck mass, which ends up being about that of a gnat.
- shpx 7y agoThe units aren't "waaay too small", it's the humans that are big. Realistically, we might also have shorthands for a convenient order of magnitude for each of the units http://www.ihst.ru/personal/tomilin/papers/tomil.pdf http://www.ihst.ru/personal/tomilin/papers/tomil.pdf but these types of decisions should probably be left for whenever people can economically measure the constants with enough precision to be serious about switching.
- pavlov 7y agoThe gram was the original base unit in the French revolutionary metric system. It was defined as the weight of 1 cm^3 of water at the temperature of melting ice. The definition was too imprecise and the kilogram turned out to be more practical, but renaming the unit would have been too much trouble I guess.
- ISL 7y agoSuch a choice might get you removed as emperor of the world -- the number related of engineering, scientific, and medical errors might be high. Generations of scientists would remember such an emperor, but not in a positive light. I share your consternation with the kilogram's name, but it is almost as fundamental to our units as Franklin's implicit, and perhaps unfortunate, choice to call the charge of the electron negative. Furthermore, the pound is a unit of force. One can find locations (poles and equator) on Earth's surface where the measured weights of an object can differ by at least 0.5% [1], making any definition of mass based upon weight troublesome. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#Latitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#Latitude
- Causality1 7y agoI'm aware of that, but had I given the value in another mass unit like AMU my meaning would have been less apparent.